Mapper and Loader

The DAMSON loader is responsible for loading and executing a DAMSON program on SpiNNaker hardware. Internally this requires DAMSON nodes to mapped to appropriate
cores, interrupt vectors to be created, cores to be initialised with the correct data and code and coordination of executing the DAMSON program on the SpiNNaker hardware device. The result of executing the loader will be that any debug (printf) output will be relayed to the host machine (and displayed in the console) and any logs will be generated in the current working directory with a format equivalent to the DAMSON emulator.

Linking of DAMSON objects with DAMSONlib

Before the DAMSON loader can be executed the prototype object files from code generation must be linked with the DAMSONlib runtime environment for SpiNNaker. The code generation stage will have generated a make file (dmake) to carry out this operation as follows;

make -f dmake

The result will be that each DAMSON prototype object will
be linked and rearranged ready for loading to a file with the *.aplx extension.

Loading and Execution of DAMSON on SpiNNaker

The DAMSON loader executable expects a single argument, a
loader file (*.ldr) output by the DAMSON code generator. This loader file will
expect that any DAMSON prototype objects will have been linked using the provided make file (dmake). Two additional files are required by the loader which must
be in the working directory;

spinnaker.ini - An additional configuration file
(spinnaker.ini) is also required in the working directory of the loader
executable. This file is expected to contain the IP address of the SpiNNaker
hardware and the x and y dimension of the chip layout (space separated on the
first line). Future versions will allow a subsequent line separated set of dead
cores which should be ignored during the mapping process.For the 4 chip SpiNNaker boards this file
will contain the plain text 192.168.0.52 2 2. This specifies the address of the
SpiNNaker board and 2D chip layout (e.g. 2x2).